Search Results for: islands

‘YOU KEEP OUT OF HARM’S WAY, SOPHIE FARTHING’ Her father’s advice seemed only sensible. The flying island of High Haven was a dangerous place. So what was she doing down on the docks at midnight, talking to the sinister gentleman with the iron jaw? Where had he come from on his majestic space yacht? And why did he laugh when she spoke of her poor dead mama? Sophie only wanted to talk to him again. She didn’t really mean to stow away – certainly not on the wrong ship. Her unintended quest is to take Sophie far from home, to the pleasure gardens of the Moon, the grogshops and grime of Lambeth Walk, through the perilous Asteroid Sea and the cruel canyons of Mars where Angels fill the red sky with their ravenous cries.

In 1890 the Russian author Chekhov undertook an historic journey across Siberia to the convict island of Sakhalin. A hundred years later, in an isolated artist’s retreat, a Soviet film unit prepares to commemorate his journey by using a technique that will cause their chosen actor to not only play the role of the playwright, but to believe that he is Chekhov.

But the situations Mikhail acts out diverge wildly from known biographical facts when Chekhov hears of an explosion in the Tunguska region of Siberia. Yet the real Tunguska explosion occurred in 1908 – so how could Chekhov have possible heard of it in 1890?

To escape his life in England, John Trencher volunteers to teach schoolchildren on a tropical island. But paradise has its darker, less innocent side, and a web of violence, taboo and sexuality soon begins to wind itself around him.

In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave contains the compelling and erotic title tale, and seven short stories on similar themes.

THE EPIC FANTASY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND CONTINUES . . .

Kieto’s destiny, set in the heavens, is to conquer the Land-of-Mists, the mysterious island discovered by Kupe, one of the great Polynesian voyagers. But he knows it won’t be easy: the wild native tribes, particularly the Scots and Picts, have two formidable advantages – iron and horses.

But Kieto has heard of a magnificent warrior race, the Maori, who live in another world and from whom he hopes to learn the secret of success in war. The gateway to this world is on the island of giants, and Kieto and his friends, Boy-Girl, Seumas and Dorcha, themselves taken years before from the Land-of-Mists, leave the safety of Rarotonga and embark on an epic voyage of discovery aboard THE PRINCELY FLOWER.

Pursued by sea-fairies, vengeful gods, power-hungry priests and, in Seumas’s case, by a murderously angry son, confronting their worst fears and supernatural horrors, the friends finally face the awesome wrath of the mighty Maori.

THE PRINCELY FLOWERS is the second wonderful volume of THE NAVIGATOR KINGS, set in the richly imaginative world of Polynesian life and myth.

When Kupe, one of the great Polynesian voyagers, chases a huge octopus across the ocean, he discovers the strange and mysterious Land of Mists and rescues a man and a woman from the wild sea. He carries them back to the island of Raiatea where the pale strangers witness the momentous events that follow the death of the king and the struggle for succession.
But the gods are watching also, and when Prince Tangiia and his followers secretly flee the island in search of a new home, their intervention becomes inevitable.
Delighting in the rich and colourful detail and myth of Polynesian life, The Roof of Voyaging is the first part of a wonderful tale which will become a landmark in fantastic fiction.

After roving through space for centuries, a starship unburdens its cargo of human embryos on a harsh new world. They quickly grow to maturity in the ship’s artificial womb. A lifetime of Earth memories is programmed into their dreams.
But before their indoctrination is complete, an alien intruder infiltrates and destroys the system, and the reason for the odyssey is never learned.
Now, on a verdant island surrounded by quicksand, Othman, wanderer, dreamer, and self-proclaimed leader of the Earthling band, builds a mighty bridge to span the ocean of molten mud that keeps them from the world beyond.
He has yet to face the deadly toll his quest will take on the delicate ecology of the planet – or the revolt of his beautiful, strong-willed wife, Silandi. And he has yet to discover the hidden knowledge locked deep within their hearts.

The Lyonesse sequence evokes the Elder Isles, is a baroque land of pre-Arthurian myth now lost beneath the Atlantic, where powerful sorcerers, aloof faeries, stalwart champions, and nobles eccentric, magnanimous, and cruel pursue intrigue among their separate worlds . . .

When Princess madouc discovers that she is actually a changeling left by fairies in place of a baby boy, she sets out, with her servant and companion Pymfyd, to find her true identity. Madouc locates her mother, the fairy Twisk, easily enough, but her paternity poses a problem: Twisk is not certain who fathered her child.

Meanwhile, her uncle, King Casmir, attempts to conquer the whole island of Hybras, on which Lyonesse is located, and thwart the prophesy of Persilian the Magic Mirror that his sister’s son would one day rule. He is foiled at every turn by King Aillas of Troicinet and his son Dhrun, who is actually the child of the prophesy, but is older than expected because of a youth spent in the fairy shee (home), where time runs differently. A sly mixture of satire and epic, Vance’s medieval tale is a delightful conclusion to an epic fantasy trilogy.

Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1990

It lay in the grass, tiny and white and burning. He stooped, put out his fingers. And then there was nothing. Nothing but darkness and oblivion. A split second demolition of the world of Richard Avery.
From a damp February afternoon in Kensington Gardens, Avery is precipitated into a world of apparent unreason. A world in which his intelligence is tested by computers, and which he is finally left on a strange tropical island with three companions, and a strong human desire to survive.

But then the mystery deepens: for there are two moons in the sky, and the rabbits have six legs, and there is a physically satisfying reason for the entire situation.

‘Welcome to Heaven’, said the voice. ‘The acquisition programme is entirely for females; but the occasional enterprising male does not displease us.’

Berry, Chief of his clan, knew his people could survive the dangers of the forest; and when winter came he made them build barricades against raiders from other clans. But no barricades were strong enough to hold against the Night Comers – huge silver beings of horrifying strength who carried away the womenfolk and were drastically lowering the human population.

Were the Night Comers men, monsters or gods? Berry believed they were men; and when the inevitable night came when the women of his clan were seized, he managed to follow. He followed them to a huge tapering column of metal, which took him away from the world he had known to an island in the sky called ‘heaven’.

And there Berry realised that he had to defeat the Lords of Heaven if the people on Earth were to survive.

Dane Belfast is a young scientist seeking the whereabouts of a missing geneticist and family friend.A visit to the mysterious Cadman Corporation results in his being drugged and whisked off to a secret location called Dragon’s Island, where “not-men” and other strange creatures – as well as human geniuses – seem to be created. Dane can’t tell who to trust in this fast-paced adventure, which is the first novel to use the term “genetic engineering”.

Don’t think new thoughts, don’t improve anything, don’t wander over the next hill: these were the commandments for the men and women of the experimental village – one of those careful nurtured settlements established after the collapse of world civilization.

The rules were made by the benevolent Masters of the Island – and they had to be obeyed. To disobey was to be destroyed. But Robert Ventnor, villager with a dangerously high quotient of curiosity, was the exception. He fled – and evaded liquidation.

But he fled right into the hands of THESE SAVAGE FUTURIANS and thereby supplied the key that could blast apart civilization’s second chance and destroy the world once and for all.

A collection of John Sladek’s hilarious SF satires, including:
The Last of the Whaleburgers
Great Mysteries Explained!Red Noise
Guesting
Absent Friends
After Flaubert
The Brass Monkey
White Hat
The Island of Dr Circe
Answers
Breakfast with the Murgatroyds
The Next Dwarf
An Explanation for the Disappearance of the Moon
How to Make Major Scientific Discoveries at Home in Your Spare Time
The Kindly Ones
Fables
Ursa Minor
Calling All Gumdrops!

When the curiously exotic millionairess Klai Ford started telling him about ghosts in a uranium mine, Sawyer knew he’d better be ready for anything in his investigations.

But he didn’t count on being drawn into a passage between dimensions and tossed adrift in a world of islands floating in the sky, where strange brute-like creatures were attacking the cities in a vast struggle for power.

Lost in this new world, Sawyer realised that the key to everything lay in the mysterious Well of the Worlds – and that the future of the universe lay in its secret.

Dive into adventure in the last unknown territory on Earth – the sea. Join Robby Hoenig and a cast of characters as unusual as any ever met on a distant planet . . .

In the third Robby Hoenig adventure, Secret Under the Caribbean, the key to a baffling puzzle – and the truth about a mysterious monster – are locked inside a sunken Spanish ship . . .


Gordon R. Dickson’s Robby Hoenig adventures are timeless young adult stories in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island.

Dive into adventure in the last unknown territory on Earth – the sea. Join Robby Hoenig and a cast of characters as unusual as any ever met on a distant planet . . .

In the second Robby Hoenig adventure, Secret Under Antarctica, a scientific expedition becomes a race to stop a terrorist plot for world-wide disaster, buried beneath the ice of the South Pole . . .

Gordon R. Dickson’s Robby Hoenig adventures are timeless young adult stories in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island.

Dive into adventure in the last unknown territory on Earth – the sea. Join Robby Hoenig and a cast of characters as unusual as any ever met on a distant planet…

In the first Robby Hoenig adventure, Secret Under the Sea, an aquatic visitor from another world is threatened by a criminal gang…

Gordon R. Dickson’s Robby Hoenig adventures are timeless young adult stories in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island.

Kainui is one of a pair of double planets circling a pair of binary stars. Mike Hoani has come there to study the languarge of the colonists. But Kainui is an ocean planet, covered in water 1700 miles deep, with no solid ground anywhere. The population is scattered in cities on floating artificial islands with no fixed locations. The atmosphere isn’t breathable, and lightning, water-spouts, and tsunamis are constant. Out on the great planetary ocean, self-sufficiency is crucial, and far from any floating city, on a small working-family ship, anything can happen. Mike’s academic research turns into an exotic nautical adventure unlike anything he could have imagined.

Trullion – World 2262 of the Alastor Cluster – was a beautiful waterworld of fens, mists, idyllic islands set in clear oceans whose teeming richness provided food for the taking. The Trill were a carefree, easy-living race. But violence entered their lives during the raids of the galactic pirates known as the Starmenters. And there was also the planetwide game of hussade, when the Trill’s ferocious passion for gambling drove them to risk all – even life itself – on the hazardous water-chessboard gaming fields. Their prize? The virginal body of the beautifu sheirl-maiden, the body any Trill is willing to die for.

From the moment when young Christopher Blackburn is prevailed upon to attend a seance at The Seekers’ Temple a series of seemingly inexplicable and increasingly terrifying experiences gradually convinces him that he has been singled out by some unknown power which is bent on his destruction. But why? And what can he have which has attracted the attention of the sinister Guardians? In a desperate hunt for the answers to these questions Christoper learns for himself the old truth that no man is an island; the new one that it is possible to be in two times at the same place; and the sombre one that some of us are more responsible to posterity than we care to admit!

The first coming was the Man:
The second was Fire to burn Him;
The third was water to drown the Fire;
The fourth is the Bird of Dawning.

Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain’s seven island kingdoms.

Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy’s own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a fury of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship.

A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

Three men against the might of Atlantis…

Fleeing from the volcanic eruption that devastated the island kingdom of Atlantis, three men escape to Britain – the island of the Yerni. The three are Prince Ason of Mycenae, the Egyptian envoy Iteb and Aias, the man from Byblos whom Atlantis had enslaved.

Mycenae’s vital British tin mines have been laid waste – their guardians massacred. The three voyagers – together with Naikeri, proud daughter of the Albi and Ason’s lover – take on the warlike Yerni.

Then their old enemies the Atlanteans invade, and it becomes imperative to unite the Yerni against them, to forge a new nation from warring tribes by raising the mighty stone symbol of a new order…

THE TRILOGY CONCLUDES…



In West of Eden and Winter in Eden, Harry Harrison, an acknowledged master of imaginative fiction, broke new ground with his most ambitious project to date. He brought to vivid life the world as it might have been, where dinosaurs survived, where their intelligent descendants, the Yilanè, challenged humans for mastery of the Earth, and where the human Kerrick, a young hunter of the Tanu tribe, grew among the dinosaurs and rose to become their most feared enemy.



Now, in Return to Eden, Harrison brings the epic trilogy to a stunning conclusion. After Kerrick rescues his people from the warlike Yilanè, they must regroup and consider their future. They find a safe haven on an island and there begin to rebuild their shattered lives. But with fierce predators stalking the forests, how long can these unarmed human outcasts hope to survive? They need weapons, but they only effective weapons lie in the hands of the technologically superior Yilanè. The small band of humans has no choice but to confront their face head-on.



And, of course, Kerrick cannot forget Vaintè, his implacable Yilantè enemy. She’s been cast out from her kind, under sentence of death, but how long will her banishment last? For her strange attraction to Kerrick has turned into a hatred even more powerful than her inbred instincts – an obsession that compels her to hunt down Kerrick and kill him. In a world completely unlike her own, two great cultures struggling for mastery of the Earth face the same problem that faces us today: how to coexist on the same planet completely unlike ourselves – or mutually perish.

The transformation of a highly civilized, blue-blooded young Bostonian into the savage bone-and-muscle chief of a band of shaggy cavemen is a challenge worthy of the talents of the man who created Tarzan of the Apes.



In THE CAVE GIRL, Edgar Rice Burroughs tells, in a thrill-after-thrill novel, the story of Waldo Smith-Jones and how his desperate effort to survive on a lost island of primitive men and primitive beasts. How Waldo was given the name of Thandar, how he had won the hand of the cave princess Nadara, and how he overcame the most desperate of odds make this a real Tarzan-type epic.

They called him Number Thirteen, the latest and best of Dr. Von Horn’s attempts to make life from lifeless chemicals. He found himself an almost-human on Von Horn’s hideaway jungle island off the coast of Borneo. He saw the monsters that had preceded him and grew used to those dreadful travesties of humanity.



Not until Number Thirteen met the American girl who was Von Horn’s unwilling prisoner did he realize how different he was from the others. Because, monster or not, he turned against his master and threw in his lot with the girl and his friends in their desperate effort to escape the island of terror.



The story of THE MONSTER MEN is an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel of savages, primitive monsters and jungles in the best Tarzan style.